Google Search Features Images, News or Shopping Results 34% of the Time [Study]

SEO technology company Conductor recently set out to see how many “blue links” were still alive and well on a search engine results page. So the company analyzed 1.5 million keywords that included a mix of informational, transactional, and navigational to find out. The results painted a picture of the percentage of links, multimedia (universal search results) and ads found in the SERPs.

Eighty-eight percent of the SERPs contain organic search results with 9 or more blue links on Page 1, with 10 showing 73 percent of the time.

Of the keyword queries studied, the search results had images, news, or shopping results 34 percent of the time, with images showing for 28 percent of the searches.

As for ads, Conductor’s research showed 55 percent of the SERPs showed nine or more ads, with the majority of searches showing 11 ads.

Of course these results can vary both individually and collectively based on industry, search volume and other factors. For example, we’d expect to see a higher incidence of shopping results if we were to focus on a bucket of transactional keywords. But, our sample of a million and a half keywords is a good finger-in-the-air test of the occurrence of key rich elements across a broad set of keywords.

With this study, Conductor is saying that organic search results are alive and well, and with the occurrence of multimedia in the SERPs, such as images, it represents more ways to optimize in order to be found.

This week, both LinkedIn and Facebook are beefing up their paid social offerings in different ways, while Google seeks to cut off Adwords revenues for fake news sites. And might Google be favouring desktop over its own AMP in its upcoming mobile-first index?

Here we’ll take a look at the basic things you need to know in regards to search engine optimisation, a discipline that everyone in your organisation should at least be aware of, if not have a decent technical understanding.